Samsung Exynos 5 Octa Specs & Details

[This is an ongoing story: Samsung will reveal more details as we get closer to Solid State Circuits Conference (Feb 19) Mobile World Congress (Feb 25-28), so we will update this page accordingly]

The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa is a chip that was announced at CES 2013 on January 10 2013. The Exynos 5 Octa is built on Samsung’s 28nm process (5000X thinner than a human hair) features four ARM Cortex A15 cores (1.6GHz-1.8GHz) and four Cortex A7 cores (1.2GHz). Technically, the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa features 8 cores as its name indicates. However, only four cores can be active at any given time.

For more information on the big.LITTLE architecture, you can refer to our previous post about big.LITTLE. Although ARM representatives talked about their new Mali graphics processor (GPU) which include GPU-computing* capabilities, the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa does not use a Mali GPU, but a PowerVR SGX-544MP3, which can handle twice as many triangles as the SGX-543MP4 of the iPad 3 can. We’ll take a closer look to the iPad 4 in the near term.Another interesting fact: the Samsung Exynos Octa GPU is clocked at 533MHz, which is quite a bit higher than the iPhone 5 (266MHz) and the iPad 4 (300MHz). At the moment, we cannot run any benchmarks yet, but it is fair to say that this will come soon enough.

Officially, Samsung claims that Exynos 5 Octa can consume up to 70% less power than the Exynos 5 Dual (a 32nm chip) which equips the Google Nexus 10 tablet. This is probably true in specific situations, but what actually matters is the average gain. In any case, it is certain that in a sleep state the difference should be quite drastic – and most of the time, your devices are in a sleep state.